Seminar Details

Fair division of indivisible items is a central problem in algorithmic game theory, with many natural applications in resource allocation. Unlike divisible resources, indivisible items cannot always be allocated in a perfectly fair way, so one of the main goals is to design algorithms with provable fairness guarantees.

In this introductory talk, I will focus on the maximin share (MMS), one of the most widely studied fairness notions for indivisible items. I will explain the basic motivation behind MMS and discuss why large items play an important role in designing fair allocation algorithms. The main message of the talk is that allocating large items early can be a useful and intuitive principle for obtaining strong approximation guarantees. 

Short Bio: Xin Huang joined Kyushu University in 2024 as an Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. in 2020 from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. After that, he spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. His research focuses on algorithmic game theory, especially fair division of indivisible items, approximation algorithms. His work aims to design efficient algorithms with provable fairness guarantees and to understand the computational boundaries of fair allocation problems.